


no sweeter sorrow

by forochel



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Cultural Differences, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Mother-Son Relationship, Post-Canon, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 17:24:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13035900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forochel/pseuds/forochel
Summary: Sam, in the immediate aftermath of the final events in Abhorsen.





	no sweeter sorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [valmora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/gifts).



> dear valmora, I was very excited to see that we matched on the Old Kingdom series. thank you for giving me a time-pressing reason to reread the books and experience them all over again! Sam's thoughts got away from me a bit, but I did my best to wrench him back into the general shape of your prompts. Nick's not a tagged character because he doesn't really ... do ... much. I hope you enjoy this. happy yuletide!

  
  


* * *

  
  


It would be a kinder tale, I think, if in the aftermath of Orannis bound, we were to imagine ourselves on a Paperwing, soaring up and away on the last drafts of Free Magic, leaving behind all that choking dust and dry heat, the scorched earth and that freshly gashed hollow. 

There is a single shrub, stubborn gorse, burnt black and stark against the bleeding sky. 

Abruptly, the heavy clouds brought close and low by the Lightning Farm break — and we, the Paperwing, all the stricken land is doused with water, fresh and pure and a little staticky, still, from the lingering Magic in the air. No wind blows from the North yet.

This does not bar Sam, far below, from skidding to his knees next to his aunt, Charter marks already weaving themselves into a spell of heat and healing on his tongue as he lays desperate fingers over the bleeding stump of her wrist and spits them out. A golden brace of marks, laced together in fine filigree, settle and sink into the raw flesh and bone — Sam barely stops himself from gagging, and focuses on his heartbeat, on the marks still fleeting through his mind, plucking them out in triplets and quintuplets, numbers of stability.

A light touch to his head brings him up out of it: out of nerves reknitting, blood vessels pinching shut, infection burning out. 

“It is well done, Sam,” his mother says, quiet and firm. “Let the body do as it will.” 

He lets the marks sputter out, surfaces from how deep — surprisingly deep — he’d gone into the Charter, and sways, lightheaded. 

Sabriel catches him by the shoulders, hands strong and ... and _alive_. Sam almost sobs with it. 

“ _Mum_ ,” he says, raw and aching, feeling five again and like all he wants to do is turn into her arms and bury his face in her heavy, coarse hair. 

She hugs him, quick and hard, one hand in his hair. 

Sam thinks he hears her say something like “Oh, my sweet boy,” — something that would be deeply embarrassing on any other occasion than saving the world — but before he can really burst into tears there are shouts from further up the hill, and his mother is drawing to her full height again, mantle of the Abhorsen settling fully around her.

No-one, not even his dad, manages to look quite as heroic as his mum, especially like this: with her battle armour on, bandolier of bells gleaming in the low light and rain. There’re fine wrinkles spidering out from the corners of Sabriel’s eyes as she looks up the hill, and that makes Sam’s heart trip. More lines spider out from the corners of her mouth when she looks down at Sam, still knelt in the mud, smiling.

“It’s your friend, Sam. Nick’s alive.”

  
  


***

  
  


A kinder tale would have Sam and his family, newly found aunt and best friend included, all back up in Belisaere feasting like victors and the Southerling issue thoroughly resolved. Corolioni and his ilk routed, fixes put in just like that.

As it is, the gears of Ancelstierran bureaucracy grind on whilst little skirmishes against the unbound Dead drag on.

“Like rats,” Sabriel says, annoyed over a quick supper in Waverley, before striding back out into the dark.

Touchstone looks equally annoyed, to be hampered by the chains of diplomacy and the limited reach of Ancelstierran telephones. 

Lirael lies still in her sickbed, as does Nick, and they do not yet wake. Sam sits between their beds and worries, feeling more useless than he has in _days_. In the mad rush down from Belisaere to Ancelstierre, he has felt: mind-numbing terror, blank determination, bone-deep weariness. But at least he has felt anything but this hated old feeling that had soured the edge of his fear of the Dead. And now he hasn’t even got anything to tinker with.

“Aaaaaaagh,” Sam whispers into the uncaring cool dark of the room, and presses his palms into his eyes. “Chin up, Sameth! You’re a Wallmaker now! Think like one!” 

He forces his mind onto the matter of the Destroyer’s bindings, and before long he finds his thoughts running deliriously along the same grooves over and over: the three terrible blasts, what to do with the hemispheres, how to keep them secure, other than reburying the hemispheres far apart — far, far apart. What bindings he could work alongside the Abhorsens. What Charter marks, what barren future they have just averted, what he almost lost —

Time, for Sam, runs forward into sleep.

  
  


***

  
  


He’s woken by coughing, and the rustling of cloth. 

No — that’s not what it was — booted feet ringing on the flagstones outside. Boots? Soldiers. 

Sam feels his brows draw together: soldiers in Wyverley outside of an emergency. It had been a fight enough to have Lirael and Nick put in the same room together; only Sam’s presence as a _chaperone_ quelled the matron. 

“Whass g’on?” rasps Lirael, before coughing again.

Sam almost falls over himself to pour out a mug of water for her. 

Funny, how his next thought is about where he could get some tea from. Ten years in Ancelstierre leaves its marks. And Nick was sure to want a cuppa whenever he woke. 

“I don’t know,” Sam whispers, handing over the mug.

Lirael’s answer is lost to frantic gulping of water, and the muted commotion outside the room just before the door swings open.

“—inister Sayre’s nephew!” says the man with a — Sam squints — colonel’s bars on his chest.

“Nick’s here.” Sam straightens up and points to his right. “Alive. Asleep. Cared for.” 

Channelling his father and Ellimere, Sam draws as much royal chill as he can into his voice and adds, “Which is, I have been told, Colonel, more than can be said for how Corvere received my parents.” 

He hears Lirael choke a little on her water, and the faint memory of Kibeth — the Disreputable Dog — whuffing with laughter. 

The colonel pales. Sam watches his adam’s apple bob nervously, and thinks suddenly of the first time he’d heard of _Adam-and-Eve_ , and how torturous chapel had been every morning, before he’d made friends with Nick, who’d always watched the goings-on with the same supercilious skepticism with which he'd greeted the Old Kingdom’s magic. That probably wouldn't happen any more, at any rate. 

“I — your Highness,” says the colonel, sounding choked. He would, Sam thinks, have a pleasant face if not for the unfortunate nature of his nose. And attitude. “My apologies for your — the rebels have been taken in hand and await trial in Corvere —” 

“That rotter Coriolini’s been locked up, then?” someone says, striding through the doorway just as dawn breaks and watery morning light starts shining in around the curtains. “I must write Sulyn —”

Sam didn't think the colonel could get any paler. 

“Y-y-” stammers the colonel. “Your ... Majesties?” 

“Rumours of our death,” says Sabriel very drily, “have been very much exaggerated.”

  
  


***

  
  


Nick has always been something of a staunch republican, but hasn’t let that get in the way of their friendship. Mostly.

“But how do you stand all that ... all that ... pomp and circumstance, though, old boy?” he occasionally asked, over tea in Somersby. Tea in their study, recently elevated to Fifth Form as they’d been. Tea served in Nick’s hereditary china.

The only hereditary thing in Sam’s family is the magic and responsibility in his veins, and an entire kingdom to restore.

“Lots of circumstance,” Sam said absently, then, turning the muffin he’d spitted on the end of a poker so it’d toast evenly. There was the telling sizzle and pop as the butter scraped thinly over it melted off into the fire. “Not much pomp. Death, mostly. Or the threat of.” 

Death, the threat of, has been imminently removed by his mother’s night of hard work and then a true dawn cleansed by a heavy downpour. 

This leaves Sam’s Aunt Lirael at loose ends, and increasingly cranky in unfamiliar idleness.

Sam’s parents recently departed, hapless Colonel in tow, to sort out yet another diplomatic snarl. Sabriel will have to fly back across the border soon with the hemispheres; inert as they were in Ancelstierre, it had been proven that burying them beyond the Wall was easily overcome. Sam thinks dropping one hemisphere in the ocean south of Ancelstierre and burying the other somewhere in the wild North of the Old Kingdom ought to do it, but no one has thought to ask him. 

“Sam,” Lirael says, throwing back her covers and swinging her feet out onto the thinly carpeted floor without so much as a shiver. “I’m going for a walk. Where are my boots?” 

“But — your hand —” 

“I can walk without a hand,” snaps Lirael. Sam’s eyes are drawn to her side, where she is worrying at the little soapstone dog again. “I just need — air.” 

“I — all right. Boots, um, there.” Sam gets them from where they’d been lined up next to the wall and put them next to her. 

Lirael pulls them on, muttering angrily under her breath as she tries to slide her feet in one-handed. Sam hovers, uncertain of his help’s welcome. 

“Oh, Charter take it,” Lirael groans, before spitting out some Charter marks.

The laces slide smoothly through the eyeholes on her boots and wind themselves into a knot, sparking a little only on the ends. 

“Right!” Lirael rocks to her feet as Sam is still trying to impress the marks she’d used into his mind. She overbalances, almost. “I’m going! See if there’s a library around here ...” and then she casts a look, almost soft, at the figure lying still in the bed across the way from hers. “He’ll be all right, Sam.” 

“I know,” Sam says, shifting uneasily. 

Neither of them can feel Nick near Death. He’s sleeping; merely sleeping. 

Sam sighs heavily as the door shuts behind Lirael, and folds over to touch his toes, wincing as his lower back cracks. 

The vigil continues.

  
  


***

  
  


His mother, unexpectedly, is the one to find him gazing blankly out the window next to Nick’s bed. The days have lengthened past the long night of Ancelstierrian winters, but still the westering sun is already sinking in the sky. Lirael’s wandering has been long; Sam wonders if she’ll be back soon or if she has found something to occupy herself with. The Wyverly library, perhaps.

Sabriel’s backing into the room, hands occupied with a tray bearing steaming bowls of stew. 

“Sameth,” his mother says. “A hand, please?” 

Sam gets up in a hurry to help, and can’t help but feel some nervousness twinging under his ribs as they settle down with their evening meals: Sabriel sitting on the edge of Lirael’s bed and Sam back in his chair. He can count on one hand, perhaps, the number of times he’s been alone with his mother since going away for school. Old resentment curls in his chest, when he thinks about all the near misses, the hurried kisses dropped into his hair. 

“Where’s dad?” he asks, dipping a spoon into his stew: thick, hearty, brown stuff with the consistency of sticky swamp water and mysterious lumps of meat. A specialty of the Perimeter, to be sure. 

“Diplomacy,” Sabriel says succinctly, and spoons five mouthfuls of stew into her mouth in quick, unqueenly succession. 

Sam feels a smile crack through the resentment in his chest at that, and lowers his head to his own meal. 

Half his bowl passes in silence that verges on comfortable, before Sabriel breaks it.

“You haven’t been outside this room in a day, I’m told,” she says. And then, lightly: “The ladies of Wyverly aren’t so intimidating as you may think, Sam!” 

Sam wonders if Ellimere has had a chance to tell her about all the failed ... matches. If this is more of the same. 

“That isn’t,” Sam starts. “I mean, I know they’re not, mum. Ellimere’s graduated, after all.” 

Sabriel barks out a loud laugh at that, and they both turn to look at Nick, suddenly abashed. 

“Mmmm, poor lad.”

Nick’s always been fairer than Sam, but now he looks all washed-out, frighteningly so. Almost translucent against the warm, brown blanket covering him up. 

“He hasn’t stirred at all. Not even once.” 

“Well,” Sabriel says, picking her spoon back up. “Coming back from the Dead takes a fair bit out of you, you know. And he’s been a host to a terrible thing for a long time.”

Sam mostly manages to forget that his mum is ... a figure who borders on mythical, even now. 

“Poor old Nick,” he echoes softly and reaches out to press his fingers to the slow, steady pulse at Nick’s wrist. “Shouldn’t ever have made friends with the strange foreign boy from beyond the Wall, should you?” 

Sabriel’s eyes on him are warm and a wee bit more understanding than Sam would like in his _mother_. 

“I didn’t even manage to save him, in the end,” he tells her. “That’s why I ...” 

“Performed an escape worthy of my younger days?” Sabriel finishes, smiling at him.

“Um,” says Sam, and has a flashback to Mogget’s comparison of Lirael’s planning abilities to Sabriel’s. “Well.” 

Sabriel laughs and puts her empty bowl down on the abandoned tray. “Oh, Sam, my sweet boy. You’ve grown up, haven’t you?” 

And then she hugs him, uncaring of the bowl of stew still in Sam’s lap. 

He breathes in her uniquely mum-smell of leather, bell metal, and clean Charter magic all bound up in the oils she uses in her hair, and lets himself sob a little into her shoulder. 

“I’m so very proud of you,” Sabriel says into his hair, hand cupped round the back of his head. Sam is abruptly very conscious of the fact that his curls are matted with dirt and sweat and probably blood, besides. “And I have always been, Sameth.” 

“M-mum,” he just about manages. Sam can’t really remember the last time his mum held him like this, and soaks it all up. Ellimere isn’t here to tell him to get on with things, and he’s all too aware that the Abhorsen’s duties won’t be held off for very long.

  
  


***

  
  


Sam is content to cling to his mother in this unexpected pocket of calm, until Sabriel sits back with a “Well then!” that’s a little hoarse.

“It was very brave of you, in any case, to have struck out on your own to save your friend.” 

“I ...” a complicated knot of regret and shame and pride swells up in his throat again. “I didn’t ... Nick’s my best friend, mum, and I was worried, and that book you gave me ... I can’t say it was entirely brave of me.” Sam sighs and sets aside the remnants of his stew, long gone cold. “I’m not a hero, mum.” 

Sabriel hums, her grey eyes piercing even in the gloaming dark. “You do all right, I think. Heroes who only have one thought in their heads at a time are fanatics.” 

Sam shifts uncomfortably. He doesn’t really want to be a hero, to be honest. 

“Well!” says Sabriel, very undiplomatically changing the topic. “Your friend Nick!” 

It is highly unlikely that Nick’s woken up during their bonding moment, but it does also seem like the sort of extremely inconvenient thing Nicholas Sayre would do, so Sam turns quickly to check on Nick. The man lies there still, slumbering away.

Again, the look in his mum’s eyes is disconcerting and — not good. But all she says is, “His uncle’s men have insisted on moving him down to their hospital in Corvere, I’m afraid.”

“What!” Sam starts half out of his chair. “But — Nick’s injuries — they’re not —”

“We managed to negotiate a convalescence period up here, at least so we can make sure that Kibbeth’s blessing has ... stabilised the Free Magic damage, but, well. Nick has powerful family.” 

“His da’s all right,” Sam says absently, as he peers hard at Nick, fingers going compulsively to his pulse again. “It’s that uncle of his ... it’s just that I thought after all that, Nick’d be coming up to Belisaere with us, mum.” 

The plaintive note in his voice slips out, and there’s a dull clink as Sabriel gets to her feet. 

Her hand is heavy on his shoulder when she says, tentative, “Sam, you’ve lived in Ancelstierre more recently than I, of course, but ... things don’t change that quickly here, I don’t think.” 

The very air in Sam’s lungs seems to freeze.

“We’re not —” he shakes his head. “Mum, no, you’ve —”

“We have more pressing things to worry about in the Old Kingdom, and the Charter doesn’t care very much, of course,” Sabriel talks over him swiftly. “You know this. But, your friend — Nick, his family might ... have different opinions.”

“We’ve never — I mean, yes, boarding school is — but Nick’s never been —” Sam trips over his tongue and snatches his hand back from Nick’s wrist like it’s burning. "Nevertheless,” he says firmly. “We’ve never. It’s not like that, mum. And I’m fairly certain he’s halfway in love with Aunt Lirael anyway. Which is — understandable. Perhaps they’ll have little Wallmakers! And then I’ll —” 

Sam cuts off his panicked babble, because Sabriel’s smiling sadly down at him now, which might be worse. 

She lifts his chin with a gentle palm on his cheek, so he can’t even hide whatever it is that his treacherous face may be doing. 

“My darling boy,” says Sabriel, low and tender. “My brave, loyal boy.”

“Mum,” Sam says, a little strangled, a little complaining. “You’ll make me cry again.”

Sabriel laughs again — wonderingly, Sam thinks to himself that he hasn’t heard his mum laugh this much in such a short time in ages. “Oh, Sam. You’re young yet. There are many fish in the sea, and the Old Kingdom is a wide and —”

“Oh god.” Sam can feel the heat coming off his face. “Yes mum, all right, please, no need to — _aaaaargh_.” 

“Sleep in a bed, Sameth,” his mum orders, mercifully letting him go, teasing smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. “Lirael’s unlikely to return tonight, and we have work to do before I fly tomorrow. Wallbuilder.” 

“Yes mum,” Sam says, and smiles back at her, letting the careful spark of hope and pride blaze through him, just this once.

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> if I were to choose, I'd definitely want to be a Wall-maker. I had a lot of ideas about how to structure this -- around Sam's spinning coin trinkets or things that he's made his family -- but most of all I wanted him and Sabriel to have the bonding time that he's been so starved for. and the whole fic basically builds up to that conversation, I guess. 
> 
> kudos/comments are loved on greatly, & if you enjoyed this do consider rebageling on tumblr ... after the reveal I guess lol.


End file.
